Saw a boar family with piglets!
I was walking the dogs about 5 this evening on the track across the top of the Forest, and after half an hour or so we came across a beautiful wild boar family!
Up here the Forest parts across the top of the hill and there is a big track with bracken either side that’s open – I chose to walk there because it had been a sunny day but I’d missed most of it, so I wanted to walk as far as possible in the light! Because the crest of the hill is open, it catches the last of the daylight.
I was walking quietly along the track with the dogs a little ahead of me when suddenly I saw a big black boar sow come out from the side of the track just beyond them and stand the centre of the track. She looked at me and I quietly called the dogs back to me and made them lie down.
She trotted a little way along the track towards me and stood there looking at me for 15-20 seconds. I started to very gently and slowly move towards her, hoping for a photograph on my phone, but suddenly, 4 beautiful little toffee and ginger coloured piglets cam running out and started trotting about round her feet.
I stopped, and she stood her ground. We had one of those wonderful wildlife moments when she looked at me and I looked at her and we both took a good long look at each other. Then one of the piglets started to trot towards me and she shoved him with her nose and ran off into the bracken on the other side of the track, with the piglets all following.
What was lovely was that for a few minutes I could hear gruntings and snufflings in the undergrowth beside the path so I stayed still and made the dogs stay there, so she didn’t become spooked and charge. I could just imagine her checking on all the babies under the leaves.
We went on our way. About 5 minutes later, we saw a huge brown boar cross the path just in front of us, so again I had the dogs lie quiet but by the time I’d gotten close to where he was he had gone. I guess he may well be the father – but there was so much boar sign in that part of the Forest I’m sure there is more than one family there.
What a wonderful weekend surprise! For more info and images, including some videos, visit my Forest of Dean Wild Boar page
Julie-Ann
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I always tried to get up to the White Mountains at least once in each season because it is just so beautiful whenever! The Kangamangus highway snakes through the mountains, and accompanies a river much of the way. At this place, the river was set back some way down a non-descript side road, but there at the end, the river meanders through a sandy, beach-like setting with a steep rising hillside of dark pines on the other side. It was only my second time at that place...
"Daddy, will we see any animals?" Amina asked me as we jaunted along a narrow path out into a lightly wooded area. Searching for a way to make her disappointment less painful I waxed lyrical..
"Well, Sweetpea, you know, most animals only come out at night when its quiet and there is no one around to disturb them-- I doubt if we will see any now, they hardly ever come out in the daytime."
"Oh" she replied, obviously processing this information.
We strode on through the trees and light, stepping around fallen branches; me becoming more aware of my breath.
"Daddy." ( She still does this, pauses not so much for a response as for a moment of silence.) "Daddy, there's a big animal over there"
I felt a twinge of sadness that so many animals are nocturnal-- taking this to be her way of dealing with the disappointment by resorting to fiction.
"No, Sweetpea, I don't think so, they are all asleep this time of day."
We were leading the loose-knit procession of her Mom, and a colleague from work who lagged several paces behind us enjoying the air.
"Daddy, look there is a big animal over there..."
It was so matter of factly that I hardly bothered to take my mind off negotiating a dip in the path. As we came up, however, I looked up to see a fully grown mother moose with twin foals hardly ten yards in front of us!
She looked up at me and my daughter with the same calm, but compromised look on her face that I must have had. They are huge, and surprisingly elegant animals, notwithstanding the onomatopoeic implications of the name "moose". A full grown moose is the size of a compact car-- or at least it is proverbial where they live that the outcome of a collision with a moose in anything smaller than a pickup truck was almost invariably fatal to the car, and often the driver.
I looked about me but there was no simple way to turn and run with toddler on shoulders across the shallow ditch, and over the branches we had just gingerly negotiated.
We eyed each other, myself and the moose mom while our young ones delighted in the moment-- mine, eyes wide at the size of a REALLY big animal, and her's delighting in the fresh grass or acorns they had found underneath the golden leaves of a scrubby oak tree.
It was a moment of revelation about parenthood I will never forget. We two guardians were both caught off guard and knew each knew it. I took one step back and she turned back to grazing, gently nudging the twins to make them more attentive to the situation. A few more paces backwards and somehow I got a picture -- I don't remember taking it, maybe my colleague did, but I had it for years afterwards and would show astonished New Englander friends as corroboration of my story.
"There are people who have lived in New England their whole lives and never seen a moose even once!" they would say to me. "Twins!. Now that's something special!